CHERNOBYL:
ONCE AND FUTURE SHOCK
A liquidator's story
For the first time in print, a Belarusian scientist gives his personal recollections of the secrecy that, in the crucial period immediately following the Chernobyl accident, left the unsuspecting public exposed to fallout
ON THE Monday morning, 28 April, at the Nuclear Energy Institute of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, I switched on the apparatus - the gamma-spectrometer and the dosimeters: everything was (in physicists' slang) 'hot', which meant that there had been a big nuclear accident on the Institute's premises: our dosimetrist ran out of the laboratory, and reported that the level in the yard was about 300 microroentgens an hour. Then he was summoned by telephone to monitor the radiation contamination round the nuclear reactor of the Institute of Radioactive Technology; so that was the main source of the accident! But they had their own dosimetrists there, and the dose level was almost the same; the same was true in the vicinity of a third nuclear device... Moreover, it was clear that the radiation levels fell the further one went inside the building... When the head of the dosimetry service, A Lineva, telephoned the Central Public Health Station of Minsk, they said, 'This is not your accident.'
We looked at the tall smoke-stack, and then at the map of Europe, and we saw that the wind was blowing radiation towards Sweden. In fact, we learned later, on 1 May the level of radioactive contamination in Stockholm was 17 Curies per square kilometre from Caesium-137, and 87 Curies per square kilometre from Iodine-131).
But in our place, they brought me in a twig from the yard, and I observed that it was emitting radiation...the gamma-spectrometer showed Iodine-131 and other 'young' radionuclides... Later we tested soil and trees from many regions of Belarus, and the Institute started to measure the specific activity of foodstuffs arriving for the Institute canteen and the crêche.
Meanwhile, the dosimetry service headed by M V Bulyha was monitoring the radiation cloud hanging above Minsk.
We started to ring our relatives and friends in Minsk, advising them about safety measures. But this did not last long: at around midday, our telephones were cut off. And a couple of days later, we specialists were called into the Secrecy Department, and made to sign a 29-point document forbidding us to divulge secrets connected with the accident at the Chernobyl-plan. These included the structure of the RDMK-1000 reactor, the amount of uranium, etc, 'secrets' that had already been published in scientific literature.
And meanwhile out in the street, radioactive rain was falling...
We went home from work without looking from side to side; it was painful to see how the children were playing in the radioactive sand, and eating ices.
In our street, I went up to a street vendor and told her to stopselling her sausages, as radioactive rain was falling. But she just said:'Be off, you drunkard! If there'd been an accident, they'd have announced it on radio and TV.' A naive soul, she believed in the righteousness of the Soviet authorities.
In the evening, on Central TV, Moscow showed us how tractors with great swirls of dust behind them were tilling the soil down in Naroula
country, part of which lies in the 30-kilometre zone around the Chernobyl station. Then, on 1 May, as always, children and adults marched in columns through the streets without even guessing at the consequences. So now, today, in Belarus we have some 400 children with
thyroid cancer...who at that time knew nothing about Iodine-131...
Mikhail Byckau is a nuclear physicist, who from mid-May 1986 until his retirement from the International Sakharov Institute of Radioecology in April 1995, played an active role in the 'liquidation' (clean-up) and monitoring programmes in the contaminated area |
